An admiral writes of a world leader who is familiar to us: "He is vanity itself, sacrificing everything to his own moods and childish amusements, and nobody checks him in doing so. I ask myself how people with blood rather than water in their veins can bear to be around him.”

I cheated by putting my first sentence above in the present tense. These words were, in fact, written in July 1914 by Germany’s Albert Hopman, about Kaiser Wilhelm II. A fellow historian who, like me, has written a book about the outbreak of World War I, messaged recently, asking if I share her view of the character matches between Wilhelm and today’s U.S. president.

I do indeed. And find myself scared by them. Donald Trump’s extraordinary performance in Davos, littered with falsehoods, insults and explosions of grandiloquence, closely resembled one of the Kaiser’s public performances as he rattled his saber in the years before playing a major role in precipitating World War I.

© The Japan Times